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Before accepting a role in Anthony Neilson’s new play, Matt Smith decided to call one of the other cast members, Jonjo O’Neill. “I said, 'You’ve done a play with him; what d’you reckon?’ ” recalls Smith. O’Neill replied: “It’s like committing career suicide, but it’s good career suicide.”

Smith, 33, may be best known for playing the title role in Doctor Who between 2010 and 2013, but he is also an actor with strong stage pedigree. He is relaying this anecdote in a rehearsal room in Whitechapel, east London, a fortnight before Neilson’s play, Unreachable, opens across town at the Royal Court.

Sitting alongside us is Neilson himself, the 49-year-old Edinburgh-born playwright whose edgy, taboo-breaking work has been dividing audiences for more than 20 years. His plays include Penetrator (notorious for a scene in which a character threatens to sodomise a teddy bear) and The Censor (in which a woman defecates on stage). Such summaries rather underplay Neilson’s gift for comedy and high seriousness.

Dominic Dromgoole, the former director of Shakespeare’s Globe, is a fan: “You can hear behind his work the wish that the world was all roses, blue skies and the missionary position, but it isn’t and it grieves him that it isn’t. As well as the violence, the fragility and the anarchy, there’s an overwhelming feeling of sorrow.”

When we meet, at the end of a long day of rehearsals, Smith is dressed down in tracksuit bottoms, trainers and a T-shirt, far from the geeky dapper look he adopted in Doctor Who. Neilson, wiry, rather ferret-like, his deadpan Edinburgh accent hard to read, sports a checked flat cap.

After five weeks of unscripted rehearsals, during which Neilson gathers together the fragments of dialogue that emerge from each day’s improvisations before going off to craft them into a coherent script (rather as Mike Leigh does for his films), it sounds as if the actors at last have something concrete to work with.

From my glimpse of the script it seems to be about a director making a film set in an apocalyptic world. In it, a family sets off across America after a cataclysmic event in search of a new home. The father gets lost along the way and the mother and daughter must plough on regardless.

You might imagine that Neilson revels in the heart-stopping uncertainty of not having a script ready until the last minute, but he’s said in the past that working this way leaves him feeling “ill and exhausted”. It doesn’t sound as if the rehearsal process is all that fun either. “It’s difficult. It’s no [bed of] roses, you know,” he says. “It was fun in the first couple of weeks, but then it starts getting serious.” Smith talks about there being “tensions, there’s anxiety about”, and emotions run high.

“People shout, people cry,” says Neilson, “and people…”

“Break down,” cuts in Smith.

Sounds like hell. Why work this way?

“The pay-off, I hope, is that we end up with a play which we’ll all feel we’ve played some part in creating.”

“There a sense of achievement,” agrees Smith.

Neilson, the knee-jerk outsider, also, clearly, revels in creating something experimental which sticks two fingers up at London’s more commercial fare: “There’s still something very unimaginative about what’s going on in the West End. In mainstream theatre, the model is: take a property based on [something by] someone else that was popular, put a celebrity of some sort into it, package it and send it out there. That’s very stultifying.”

Matt Smith as the Doctor in Doctor WhoCredit:
BBC

Smith, meanwhile, has never worked in quite such a seat-of-the-pants way before. Did they ever do some improvisation to workshop the scripts on Doctor Who, I ask. Smith laughs. “No, the scripts are always really set on Doctor Who, Steven [Moffat, the screenwriter], is a very… you know…” He tails off.

He’s come up with a strategy for dealing with the uncertainty of working with Neilson. “Well, the lines change a lot, but there comes a point where you’ve just got to say, 'F--- it, I’ll just learn that, then if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll say that.’ ”

On the surface, Smith and Neilson make an odd couple: Neilson, elder statesman of the in-yer-face school of writing (a phrase he hates); Smith, television star and budding film actor who has become tabloid fodder because of his relationships with the model Daisy Lowe and, currently, the War & Peace star Lily James. At times during our conversation Smith, a rather subdued apprentice to Neilson’s sorcerer, seems bewildered by some of the older man’s more sweeping statements.

Neilson: “I mean personally I would not teach Shakespeare in schools, frankly.”

Smith: “Really? Why, why, why?”

Neilson: “You know, this is advanced stuff and we’re giving it to, like, primary school children, thinking that will encourage them to go to the theatre. Well, they’ll just be overwhelmed. One or two middle-class kids will come through and say, 'It’s marvellous that I learnt Shakespeare,’ but I’m telling you, out there the majority of the kids are just like, 'No.’ They’re put off by it.”

What about Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which seemed to speak to an audience not schooled in Shakespeare, I ask. “That’s a great movie,” says Smith, then looks at his mentor. “You don’t think this, do you? I quite like them when they’re big and stylistic.”

What Smith and Neilson do have in common is a determination to face down challenges and to reinvent themselves from project to project.

“I’ve had two experiences in my life where I said, 'If I can get through this, I can get through anything,’ ” says Smith. “One was when I had to sing [in the musical adaptation of American Psycho] and the other was when I did Doctor Who.” It would be hard to claim Smith has let himself be typecast. Since Doctor Who and American Psycho, he has played a diverse set of roles. Soon we will see him as Prince Philip in a Netflix drama, The Crown, and Robert Mapplethorpe in a forthcoming biopic.

Any suggestion that having Smith in the play is a calculated piece of celebrity casting is brushed aside. But for Neilson my question does raise a more serious point about actors paying back their dues.

Matt Smith and Claire Foy in The CrownCredit:
Alex Bailey/Netflix

“This is not just to blow Matt’s trumpet, but I think it’s actually quite important to say that a lot of the actors who have a high profile now in TV and film were people who started in places like the Royal Court. Now, a very small percentage of them ever come back and do theatre, and when they do, the majority of them appear in very safe plays. But what Matt’s done, Matt has come back and put his money where his mouth is. We could really do with seeing some of these actors who in part owe their careers to new plays and new writing come back and support all of this stuff.”

Smith looks slightly embarrassed, as if he’s just been singled out in front of the class for good behaviour. “You always think, 'Why on Earth do you put yourself through this?’ ” he says. “But then, yeah.”

As to whether working with Neilson is career suicide, Smith seems unconcerned. “When I spoke to Jonjo O’Neill he said, 'Do it, man! Do it! This is an experience. And when you look back on the palette of your life as an actor it’s: “Did you do an Anthony Neilson play? Yeah? Cool!” ’ ”